Couple questions after hosting my forum about traffic

Topper

Hi,
i recently hosted my forum (currently only in german) ideenschmiede forum
The goal is to discuss ideas on tecnical or businessideas.

I have a couple questions:

how did you grow?
how long did indexing at google take?
is it wiser to go english language and try to compete or better to start in a niche?

Fell free to pick your question

julian

That is a good question!

Growing a forum is a very nuanced question, and one that a single post cannot fully encapsulate, but it is definitely a chicken and egg game — you cannot grow your forum without users, and users are attracted to content, but you need users to make content

The main thing to remember is that no matter what search engines do to tweak their algorithms, one rule holds true: content is key. It means you need to have unique content, the fresher the better. An easy way to get started is to just blog on your forum, or have your blog connected to the forum (so blog posts automatically make a forum post).

julian

As for indexing... Google finds the site as soon as someone links to it. However, you can also submit the sitemap to various search engines for indexing as well.

Topper

Thank you julian, i guess i will start a blog on the progress of the forum ^^
I have written a whitepaper, wich is inbound as a pdf on the forum, wich i wanted to update. I guess that one doesnt get crawled be google, right? So it doesnt count as contend?
i guess i will have to evaluate the product market fit myself ( if the forum is needed as it is or has to be adjusted for example to be on a more specific topic)

dave1904

Your forum will grow by itself if you have a "usp". For example I opened my forum because the already existing forum about the same topic doesn't have any moderation. And now we have a growing community with 250 happy users who know that when they open a topic there won't be any harrasments or know that moderators will deal with it.

What's your motivation for your forum? Why is it an alternative for maybe already existing ones? Your forum will get around if you can answer these questions I guess.

Topper

@dave1904 i would say my usp will be that you can offer technical and businessideas to someone else without paying to get on the site.
I have to say untill now i havent found a convienient way to do that thought. I thought i could start as a idea discussion site, but maybe most people are to afraid that their idea is getting stolen, or that nobody would pay them when it is donation based.

My motivation is three fold:

First i want to excell progress by having smart people discussing ideas that could have an impact (tecnical, business or scienceideas or a combination of these)
I want to present my own ideas to people that are more likely able to realise them (or faster in doing so because i dont have the time or the knowledge or the resources)
the last step (when the accelleration of progress is happening throught the site) would be a voting on ideas to stirr the progress towards a common good vision, or atleast that we dont end up in a techno-dystopia

The grow by itself means groth through Google searches?

dave1904

I mean people talking like "Have you heard of the forum where you can offer technical and businessideas to someone else without paying to get on the site". If you already have some users kindly ask them to tell friends about it. But yes, if you aim for generating users, SEO is your friend and you could use AdSense or Google Ads.